8 WOMEN TAKE OFF THEIR GLOVES

Francois Ozon's campy murder mystery 8 Women will make you laugh. The only question is whether you laugh at it or with it.

Less a coherent movie than a hip spoof of overproduced Hollywood musicals and Agatha Christie-style murder mysteries, the film weaves visual elegance, lesbian subtext, six hilariously inappropriate song-and-dance numbers and a flair for chiffon into a showcase for leading ladies of French cinema past and present.

8 Women lifts the bare bones of its plot from Christie's The Mousetrap: Eight women converge in a snowbound country house. One of the eight discovers the corpse of a man with a knife in his back. Everyone's a suspect.

But in Ozon's version, the real backstabbing starts after the discovery of the crime as the generations-spanning cast of dream girls -- Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Beart, Virginie Ledoyen -- peel off and toss aside their characters' secrets like evening gloves.

Danielle Darrieux's wheelchair-optional matriarch, Ludivine Sagnier's coltish daughter of the deceased and Firmine Richard's secretive domestic servant mostly hold together the story while the higher-profile five vamp mercilessly.

8 Women's deliberate silliness may put off some viewers. But it's a gift-wrapped box of bons mots for broadminded fans who appreciate the humor in Deneuve putting down Huppert with the line, "I'm beautiful and rich. She's ugly and poor." And what right-thinking fan of high-minded international cinema doesn't want to see the former belle de jour roll around on the floor with Ardant in a hair-pulling catfight that gives way to a juicy kiss?